1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to commercial transactions and more specifically to a method and system for using relevant customer preferences in real time to customize a commercial transaction.
2. Related Art
Business intelligence information about a customer is helpful for marketing sales and services to the customer. This is particularly relevant to internet purchasing where use of personalized customer preferences can be employed to market additional product and services to a prior customer. On the internet, a customer preference profile is typically obtained by requesting the customer to respond to a list of questions asking about demographic personal information and other factors that relate to buying preferences or from tracking the customer's activity on the internet. The company then uses a computer program to model a profile for the client and to prepare a general model that predicts the outcome of future customer contacts.
This approach is problematic for several reasons. First, customer compliance is often incomplete as the customer finds the process tedious and personally invasive. In addition, it is time consuming for each business to collect, store and process this information. Moreover, retail merchants are not expert in modeling the input data and often fail to apply sufficient resources to properly use the data. As a further consideration, there may be potential liability associated with collecting and storing of customer personal information which needs to be protected from unauthorized access by others.
Thus, it would be beneficial to have a method and system that makes available in real time and at the point-of-contact, information about the customer demographics, buying preferences and lifestyle that need not be developed by the merchant. In addition, it would be useful if the information could be relevant to the customer but not personal to the customer.